Yahoo News How we became hooked on takeaways
Ding-dong! Dinner is served. On any given evening, thousands of doorbells up and down the country herald the arrival of a takeaway. While we might pride ourselves on being a nation of home cooks, modern Britain has a taste for take-out; a 2022 survey found one in five of us order a delivery at least once a month, while 11 per cent get one daily.
Over the past decade, delivery culture has exploded in the UK. From 2017, the takeaway market was growing at 1.4 per cent per year. Perhaps lockdown fuelled the habit: sales surged by 315 per cent between February 2020 and February 2021, and they haven’t slowed since.
Takeaways were never a part of my childhood where I grew up in Lancashire. We simply lived too far out. To this day, two of the market leaders, Deliveroo and Uber Eats, despite now covering 77 and 90 per cent of the UK population respectively, do not deliver to my childhood home. Top dog Just Eat, which has 19 million users globally and claims to deliver to 97 per cent of UK addresses, can offer my parents a choice of just 11 outlets, compared to the 117 available at my London flat.
A decade of Deliveroo
It was in the capital that Deliveroo launched 10 years ago this month, a British success story, but founded by American-born investment banker Will Shu. Shu had been transferred from Morgan Stanley’s New York office to London, but discovered that while delivery culture dominated in the city that never sleeps, few British restaurants offered the same service.
Enlisting his childhood friend, software engineer Greg Orlowski, to design the platform, Shu set about raising funds and contacting restaurants. On March 13 2013, the first order was biked over by Shu himself: Verace pizza, bruschetta, parmigiana, green and black olives and a Diet Coke, from Rossopomodoro, in Chelsea, London.
As it turned out, the order was bang on-trend: that year, Britain’s most popular cuisines (according to Deliveroo) were Italian, Thai, Mediterranean, dim sum and Korean. In the same 12 months that saw the birth of the cronut in New York, the world’s first test-tube burger in the Netherlands, and the fallout from the horsemeat scandal across Europe, we devoured margherita pizzas, tricolore salads and calamari in our droves.
Changing tastes
Over the past 10 years, the nation’s tastes have changed. Britons have had dalliances with Lebanese, Japanese, Mexican, Hawaiian and German dishes, alongside perennial favourites such as American, Indian and Chinese, and endless amounts of fried chicken. Shockingly, fish and chips have never made it into the top rankings. But, according to figures provided exclusively to The Telegraph by Deliveroo, it’s not the oft-trumpeted curries that have replaced fish suppers as the nation’s favourite: for six of the past 10 years, burgers have been the most-ordered takeaway.
As our tastes have broadened, so too has the scope of restaurants available to satisfy our cravings. Deliveroo started out with fewer than 100 restaurants on its books; by the end of 2022, it was working with 60,000 across the UK and Ireland. Uber Eats, meanwhile, has scaled up from 130 restaurants at launch in 2016 to 61,000 now. Over the years, we’ve also been served by Hungryhouse, Jinn, Talabat and Foodhub. All fuelling the nation’s appetite for devouring restaurant food at home.
The concept is disarmingly simple: you place an order with your chosen restaurant through the app, the restaurant prepares it, the delivery company sends a rider to pick it up and deliver it – all within about half an hour, give or take. The restaurant pays a commission to the delivery company, but doesn’t need to employ couriers of its own.
Dark kitchens
One of the industry innovations that has helped to expand our culinary horizons is the “dark kitchen”. These are restaurants without the restaurant: no tables and chairs, no waiting staff, just chefs preparing dishes to pass over to delivery drivers. Chefs using dark kitchens can be more reactive to customers, changing their menus nimbly. The data gathered through delivery apps “dwarfs any sort of in-person feedback we’d get from an actual restaurant”, explains Zan Kaufman, owner of Bleecker Burger, which operates traditional outlets in London, as well as dark kitchens that serve Deliveroo. “You can spot trends very easily,” she says.
It’s not just takeaways and the restaurants that create them that have proliferated with the rise of delivery apps. During the pandemic, between them the UK’s “Big Three” – Just Eat, Deliveroo and Uber Eats, in order of market share – partnered with Sainsbury’s, Asda, Co-op, One Stop, Boots, Londis, Iceland and Waitrose to deliver groceries on demand, too. Most of us are using this new service to buy household essentials. We are not, it would seem, ordering ingredients to cook meals from scratch ourselves.
Convenience or laziness?
“Value and price are the biggest factors in ordering food, but beyond that, convenience is everything,” explains Senior Insight Manager Katherine Prowse, of Lumina Intelligence, whose UK Foodservice Delivery Market Report has looked into ordering data since Deliveroo launched. “The convenience aspect is tied to cooking fatigue: people say they are ordering food because they’re too tired to cook for themselves. Interestingly, despite 25- to 34-year-olds making up the biggest group of people ordering via these apps, it’s the 45-54 and 55-64 age ranges who are most likely to say they order because they don’t want to cook.” Psychologically, it seems, we’ve become predisposed to ease and comfort, rather than having to work for our food.
“Has Deliveroo made us lazier and less thoughtful about our food? Yes, definitely – myself included,” says Tim Thornton with a laugh. The restaurateur founded Base Face Pizza, one of London’s top-rated pizzerias, during lockdown. “I have kids, I know what it’s like when everyone’s hungry and you just want to know there’ll be something warm and tasty waiting for you when you get home.”
Thornton’s business has partnered with Deliveroo and Uber Eats since its inception and he knows firsthand how vital it is to engage with such services. “It pays the employees’ wages, frankly,” he explains. Thornton estimates as many as 60 per cent of the pizzas he sells are through Deliveroo and Uber Eats, enabling him to sell to “customers who wouldn’t be able to come and experience your food at the restaurant”.
Even so, small restaurateurs who sell on delivery apps have voiced misgivings about the relationship, speaking out about unfair rates of commission. Niaz Caan, executive chef at City Spice, named best Indian restaurant on London’s Brick Lane, says that he was forced off some delivery platforms due to the high commission last April. Commissions vary widely, but can be as much as 30 per cent of an order’s gross (VAT-inclusive) value – potentially 37.5 per cent of what the restaurant is actually charging. “When you’re trading as a food entity, be that a takeaway or a restaurant, that’s your entire net profit and more,” Caan explains.
Restaurant repercussions
It wasn’t always this way. As with many of the “disruptive” businesses powered by millions of pounds’ worth of private equity, Deliveroo and its ilk were initially able to provide much more favourable terms. Caan recalls the first takeaway he worked in, eight years ago, which was paying 16-17 per cent commission per order. As the cheap funding dries up, delivery apps are driving a harder bargain with restaurants as they fight to make a profit. Deliveroo’s 2021 annual report stated it hopes to break even by the end of this year or the beginning of next.
During the cost of living crisis, restaurants have been hammered on all fronts: by the cost of food, wages and energy bills. Caan says: “I am glad I stepped back from take-away, with the price of everything going up. I just can’t see how you can trade all day, just for an app to come in and take most of your profits?”
Both Caan and Thornton say that in order to break even on a delivery order, they have no choice but to pass the commission cost on to the customer. “I know restaurants on Brick Lane who charge £12.95 on Deliveroo for a curry that costs £8.95 in-store,” says Caan. Thornton says his customers get a discount of about £2 per pizza if they order online and collect it under their own steam.
The future of food
Collecting a takeaway in person? How novel! But will we return to the old ways of perusing a dog-eared menu in the letter rack and strolling down the road to pick up dinner? Comfort has been the main driver behind the success of Deliveroo, Just Eat and Uber Eats, believes Caan. “It’s the same with so many apps – from food to online dating – they remove human interaction to make you more comfortable,” he says. “Why look for a takeaway menu and go through the hassle of calling and listing everything you want, when you can click it all online and get on with your evening. Psychology tells us the easier option will win every time.”
The data seem to bear out this trend, says Prowse. “Delivery is growing far faster than the rest of the food-service market,” she explains. While Frankie & Benny’s, Pizza Express and Chiquito are slashing their high-street outlets, delivery companies are capitalising.
There’s no denying that delivery culture has taken over the UK in the past 10 years, even if there are signs of the sector cooling down, with both Just Eat and Deliveroo recently announcing plans to cut jobs. Whatever happens, the take-out genie won’t go back into the bottle. We’ve been spoilt for choice; in future, whatever kind of cuisine we order, perhaps now and again we ought to say hello to our local takeaway and go foraging for dinner ourselves.
